A Learning Management System (LMS) could benefit organizations of most sizes with their consistency, scalability, and accessibility—including small businesses. Yet with often limited resources and manpower, implementing an LMS can seem like a dauting task.

Limiting resources and expertise will make implementing an LMS challenging but this effect is only worsened if the organization doesn’t prepare for it. The implementation of an LMS, like every system, can be made approachable and realistic if the proper planning and research goes into it.

Benefits of Using an LMS for Small Businesses

The benefits were touched on above briefly, like consistency, scalability, and accessibility, but there are other benefits to implementing an LMS. Namely, they’re cost effective, can be customized which allows them to meet any goal, and, through tracking and reporting, allow an organization of any size to stay updated on their training.

Consistency

Using an LMS will ensure that all learners will receive the same training, from the same material, and be tested with the same tests. This consistency eliminates the discrepancies that will arise whenever people are trained more traditionally.

Scalability

Implementing an LMS at the beginning of a small business’ growth can have immense benefits because of their scalability. Growth will be beneficial for a small business, but without scalable tools in-place it can lead to scrambling to implement items while attempting to foster the growth. Having a well-established LMS before or beginning around this growth ensures that the new people brought on can be immediately trained under consistent standards.

Accessibility

Accessibility with an LMS can refer to a few different things, for example, where and how learners can access their training or the different options for receiving the learning content. The former references that learners could access the LMS (and their training) from anywhere if they have a device and an internet connection.

Having different options for receiving the learning content refers to the ability of an LMS to deliver content from video, presentations, text, PDFs, flashcards, or interactive material like quizzes. This gives learners with disabilities or preferences choices on how they get the content.

Cost Effective

An LMS can help small businesses cut down on costs by eliminating the need to hire trainers, reducing training time, and by minimizing the need for physical materials. All these factors undoubtedly reduce costs and an LMS can deliver high-quality training at a much lower price compared to consultants.

Customization

An LMS offers customization in both materials and appearance. As mentioned in accessibility, an LMS can support a plethora of different training content, ranging from PDFs to interactable flashcards—allowing one to build their most effective training program. Furthermore, an LMS can be customized to fit the company’s branding—making it more professional.

Tracking and Reporting

An LMS, like CoreAchieve, can track all learners’ progress and display that information in concise reports. This automatic reporting can help a small business by reducing the effort needed to gage the effectiveness of the training program.

A Flexible Solution

The true power of an LMS lies in its flexibility, it can scale or down, be accessed from anywhere, and display almost any type of learning content. Small businesses need to be flexible, especially with the resources they have—so what’s the path for small business to take to reduce the pain caused by implementing new systems?

Preparing to Implement an LMS as a Small Business

With all the opportunities and moving parts, an LMS is a complex system; however, that complexity should not drive anyone away as they can be helmed by one person. Most of the issues arising from an LMS will be during the setup or implementation as an LMS can function automatously afterwards.

Identify Business Goals

An LMS will serve the goals of the business, as such before implementation a business should have grasp on its goals and then plan how the LMS help achieve those goals. Determine what training would best meet these goals as finding or creating the learning content can happen immediately after implementation.

Identify a Target Audience

An LMS does not have to be only for employees of an organization, they can also be used for customers, or partners. Defining which audience the LMS is going to be used for will impact the LMS implementation.

Start Small

Implementing an LMS does not mean that the LMS should be deployed to organization wide immediately. Instead, implement the LMS in stages and slowly roll it out across the organization to address problems as they come in much smaller quantities.

Engaging The Target Demographics

Engaging the target demographic can be difficult whenever implementing an LMS, to ensure that people get engaged with the system, develop incentives for people to engage with the system.

LMS Can Benefit Any Size Organization

An LMS can benefit any size organization as it provides consistent, flexible, and accessible training while being cost effective and scalable. For small businesses, an LMS can future proof their training programs, make training more flexible and effective.

However, because small businesses often have limited resources, the task of implementing an LMS can seem like a daunting and unnecessary task, but proper planning can make implementation much easier. From simple planning like starting the LMS small to more overarching questions of business goals, there are ways that implementing an LMS with limited resources can be done effectively.

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